World War II was effectively over by July, 1944. The Allied forces, having landed in France, were pushing straight towards Germany and the Soviets were closing in from the East. The problem was that Hitler was too ideologically crazed, too syphilitic, too demented to see the truth so something had to be done. Valkyrie tells the story of the July 20 Plot, in which a cabal of senior German officers conspired to assassinate Hitler with a bomb and then immediately cover their tracks by launching Operation Valkyrie, Hitler's own secret plan for Nazi government continuity in the event of his death. Once firmly in control of the government, the conspirators planned to surrender to the Allies, but things didn't quite go as expected. Producer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, most known for his Oscar-winning script for The Usual Suspects, recently called up SuicideGirls to talk about the ins and outs of Valkyrie.

Ryan Stewart: Hey Chris, what are you up to today?

Chris McQuarrie: I'm wandering around the streets of New York, on my way to another appointment, but I got started a little late. Where do we begin?

RS: Well, I saw the movie a few weeks ago and in the conversations I've had since, people seem to want to criticize the choice of the conspirators to plant bombs near Hitler rather than utilize something more direct, like guns. Why not walk in and blast Hitler away?

CM: The biggest reason is that it was not the most reliable form of killing. There was one conspirator who actually volunteered to go and kill Hitler with a gun. They fought for a long time about how that would actually happen. The idea of getting a weapon into a crowded room and then being able to shoot Hitler...the variables of somebody seeing the gun and trying to stop you, of wounding Hitler and not killing him and thus exposing all the conspirators and the end result meaning the execution of everyone involved, that was one specific problem. There was one occasion where a guy went with a gun to kill Hitler and he was stopped. In the conference rooms where Hitler was, everyone had to take off their guns before they went into those rooms, so there were security measures in place in those locations to prevent people from getting guns into Hitler's presence. The biggest reason was that there were too many variables. Explosives would not only kill Hitler, but a lot of the people closest and most loyal to him.

RS: Let's say that an officer did walk in or fight his way in and shoot Hitler, though. Even though it's a suicide mission, wouldn't that send a clear signal to Himmler or another successor that the officer corps was no longer having this losing war?

CM: Well, Hitler did have an enormous cult of personality surrounding him that allayed a lot of the disgruntlement and a lot of the discord within the officer corps. That cult of personality would have evaporated immediately. It did not surround people like Himmler and Goebbels they were servants of the aura that Hitler had. So, whatever may have happened nobody can really say, but the aura he brought to it would have certainly evaporated immediately.

RS: Give me your judgment of the July 20 plot as a whole. Would you call it a clever plan, or would you call it desperate, but heroic?

CM: I think it was a little bit of both. Tresckow [one of the conspirators] acknowledged that it was a long shot, but he also said that it had to be attempted regardless of whether or not they succeeded. Tresckow was one who always understood that what mattered most was that Germans within the military make an attempt at killing Hitler as a means of communicating to the rest of the world that they were not all sympathetic to him, if for no other reason, not to change the course of the war but to give Germany a chance of surviving as a country after the war ended. But in and of itself, it was actually a very meticulous and well thought-out plan. It's dramatically simplified in our movie and it succeeded everywhere but Berlin. The plot succeeded in Prague, it succeeded in Vienna, it succeeded in Paris. They managed to take Paris entirely without firing a shot. I'm firmly convinced that whether or not they had held onto Berlin, had they started right when they got the signal from the Wolf's Lair, they would have successfully taken Berlin. The coup really did collapse as a result of that phone call between Remer [a neutral junior officer who was persuaded to believe that Hitler had in fact survived the explosion] and Hitler. If they had gone and arrested Goebbels right at the outset instead of waiting three hours, that phone call never could have taken place.

RS: That scene where Remer tries to arrest Goebbels and Goebbels hands him a phone with Hitler on the other end, I thought that was totally dramatized. Did that really happen?

CM: We dramatically dramatized what actually happened in that room. We actually interviewed Hitler's bodyguard, the last man to leave the bunker in Berlin after Hitler committed suicide. He was in Berlin on that day rather than being with Hitler in the Wolf's Lair and he helped to establish that phone call. He described the scene in Goebbels' office that day. Quite frankly, Goebbels was a little bit confused and freaked out and Remer was also confused. There was a real sense of confusion and fear within the Reich Ministry and we know that Goebbels did have cyanide with him and a pistol. It was the actor's conceit. When we showed him the cyanide capsule, he said "I want to do it like this" where he puts the thing in his mouth and we all liked it and ran with it.

RS: How do we know all the minute details of Stauffenberg's plan if none of the conspirators lived to tell the tale?

CM: Your biggest contributor by far is the SS. They were so painfully meticulous in their collection of data, right down to reconstructing Stauffenberg's briefcase from all the little pieces of leather at the Wolf's Lair. Then they rounded up all the conspirators and tortured them to within an inch of their lives. They probably killed too many, too quickly, so the outlying members of the conspiracy who were rounded up were kept alive for a very long time and were interrogated quite thoroughly. Also, the character that Philipp von Schulthess plays at the beginning of the movie is based on a guy named Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was one of the last conspirators to be put on trial. All the conspirators went to the People's Court, which was Roland Freisler, the guy in the red robes at the end who is screaming at Witzleben. Freisler was very much like that, with these grand gesticulations and a lot of screaming and speeches you didn't get much of a word in. Then they sent you out of the room and they chopped your head off.

Now, an allied bombing had destroyed the portion of the prison where the guillotine was held, so they started executing people at Plotzensee by hanging them with cord as you see in the movie with Goerdeler at the end. So Schlabrendorff was one of the last guys to be put on trial and he walks in knowing that he is going to be screamed at for half an hour and then taken out of the room and executed, and as he's being escorted into the courtroom an American bomb hit the courtroom and killed Roland Freisler right in front of him. Schlabrendorff was brought back to his cell and locked up and he was never put on trial again because six weeks later the war ended and Schlabrendorff was liberated and he lived to write a book about the conspiracy from the inside.

RS: How did Stauffenberg's wife, Nina, escape the net of the SS and go on to live into her 90s? Did they just have bigger fish to fry?

CM: No, she was arrested by the Gestapo the day after the coup and her children were taken away and placed in an orphanage and their names were changed. She gave birth to her youngest daughter in a concentration camp. They were waiting until she was healthy enough to transport her and have her executed and a doctor more or less stalled them for as long as humanly possible. He protected her for as long as he could and then she was handed over to a police officer with orders to take her to a different camp where she would be liquidated. On the way there, it was a two hour drive, she basically worked on this police officer, saying that the war was going to end soon and it wasn't going to end well and telling him that her death would essentially be on him. After two hours, he pulled the car over and walked away.

RS: Wow.

CM: Yeah, he left her with the car and she drove to a relative's home, where she waited out the war. In the meantime, Stauffenberg's brother, who had been executed as a member of the coup, his wife was a renowned Luftwaffe test pilot and because of her skills, she was not implicated and she flew back and forth across the country looking for those children. Nina was still at this relative's home and a plane landed on their property and her sister-in-law got out, with all of her children. She'd found them all and they were reunited.

RS: That's incredible. Did you get to meet Nina or did she die too soon?

CM: She died a year before we got there, but we spoke to people who knew her and we spoke to other members of the Stauffenberg family.

RS: Once production on the film began, what was the hardest thing to retain from your original screenplay? I'm guessing it was having your lead character wear an eye patch.

CM: Honestly, the hardest thing to retain was the whole deliberate opacity. We did not want to make a speechified melodrama. We wanted to make an old-school war movie where men were defined by their actions, not their words, and there were lots of times in the movie where it would have been a lot easier to have a guy look in the mirror and tell the audience how he felt, and we just wouldn't allow ourselves that ridiculous conceit.

RS: I heard that you and [Valkyrie director] Bryan Singer also toyed around on set with having all these actors put on German accents and then you ended up dropping that idea.

CM: No, we never did. We discussed that very early on and we were pretty adamant about that from the beginning. We looked at films like Dr. Zhivago and Amadeus, Paths of Glory, The Sound of Music, Conspiracy, Night of the Generals, all movies that handled a similar problem by just not dealing with the accents and they feel a whole lot more grown up and more sophisticated.

RS: In your conversations with Tom Cruise, what kinds of things did he want to know about?

CM: He's a very quick study, a voracious study. He wanted to know everything. He did a lot of research on his own and amassed a sense of the character very quickly. Tom's big concerns were the nuances. He wanted to know what Stauffenberg knew and when he knew it. He wanted to understand the character's journey and how he ultimately came to the decision. He wanted to know, step by step, from Hitler's rise to power until the moment he tried to kill him, what was his journey and what was his reaction to the rise of Nazi Germany.

RS: How do you account for Nazis continuing to be so popular as movie characters? They seem to have this endless utility as bad guys, like vampires.

CM: I think there are several answers to that question. The one that rings most true to me is that it's such a shocking and inhuman period in human history that there's a desperate need to understand it. I think our need to understand it is reflected in the way we keep going back and reliving it over and over again.

RS: Are you personally done with World War II as a writing subject?

CM: I wish I was, but I never will be. I've got three more World War II projects in development right now and I always promise my manager that this will be the last one and then another great story comes along.

RS: Speaking of great stories, I've heard that you're also trying to tackle the Lincoln assassination conspiracy.

CM: Yes, Dylan Kussman and I have been working on a script about John Wilkes Booth for a number of years. It's one of several scripts, along with Valkyrie, that I wrote and then put in a drawer. I really don't bother taking them to studios, I don't try to get them financed. I just wait for the right person to come along who wants to make those movies. You know, the last seven years I've spent re-writing studio movies to support myself while also developing historical scripts with first-time writers who have a real knack for research, but don't really know how to start the screenwriting. I support them on the screenwriting side while they teach me about history.

RS: Would you like to be more prolific in the future than you have been so far?

CM: I don't know if it's a goal. As a matter of necessity, I've taken on a lot of work and Valkyrie took me away from my studio re-writing career for about a year and a half, so now I've got to get to work. But I'm not going back to that. I can't do the studio re-writes anymore. It's a dead-end proposition.

RS: Do you and Bryan always sort of know which of your passion projects you will and won't focus on together in the future?

CM: It always seems to happen very unexpectedly. I was visiting him one day on the post-production of Superman Returns and we were talking about his struggles with Logan's Run and he looked at me and said "Would you be interested in taking a crack at it?" and the next day I was writing Logan's Run. While I was re-writing Logan's Run he heard about Valkyrie and asked to read it and a couple of weeks later he called me up and said "I want to direct this movie." Bryan is very careful and he has an understanding of the film business that I don't even begin to have. He is very measured in his choices. I tend to go with what interests me, which is why I have a drawer full of scripts that are very difficult to get made.

RS: If Bryan asked you to take a crack at The Man of Steel, would you turn and run in the other direction?

World War II was effectively over by July, 1944. The Allied forces, having landed in France, were pushing straight towards Germany and the Soviets were closing in from the East. The problem was that Hitler was too ideologically crazed, too syphilitic, too demented to see the truth so something had...